"Katie McN," author of "A Girl's Stroke Story," "Making the Grade" and "Country Club Dance," is one of the heavyweights of the online erotica world. She has been nominated for seven Golden Clitorides Awards, online porno writers' equivalent of the Oscars. By her own estimates, in aggregate her stories are downloaded more than a million times per year from Usenet and the five sites she has given posting permission to. But she knows her work can also be found elsewhere: "Based on e-mail from fans and other authors, it appears that my stories appear without permission on at least 30 more sites and probably a lot more," she says.

Commercial "skimmers" scoop up these free-for-all fantasies and then repackage them in an attempt to make a profit. One smutty-story thief grabbed up literally hundreds of tales of busting bodices, cracking whips and aching loins and packaged them on a CD-ROM. The same brazen thief even advertised the stories for sale on the very newsgroup that they'd been lifted from. Frequently, these porn pilferers remove the author's name, the story's title or the copyright information to make it harder for the writer to find his or her lifted works. As Katie McN explains, it helps "to slow down the process where the author finds out and attempts to do something about it."

But Katie McN doesn't spend a lot of energy going after the story stealers. There's too little money, if any, at stake. When erotica writers do succeed in selling their work online, they're paid only a small sum for first publication rights, and in all likelihood the stories will end up freely posted on Usenet within months. Plus, Katie McN doesn't want to risk giving away who she really is: "I don't plan on revealing my identity because I'd rather not have people in raincoats showing up at my home. How could I take any legal action and maintain my cover?"

Katie McN and other authors attest that the most effective way to fight back when their stories are lifted is for a group of writers to complain en masse to the offending Web site or take their grievance to that site's Web host.

But sometimes, given the sleaziness of the story cribbers, such appeals have little effect. If a rogue site is booted by its Web host for violating copyright, within 24 hours that company can set up business with another host. Delta reports that the CD-ROM release containing her work (and the work of many others) is still for sale, despite numerous complaints to the offending site, the BackDrop Club. BackDrop did not respond to requests for comment.

Estimates of how much story lifting goes on vary, with some authors calling it "pretty widespread" and others contending that "most commercial sites abide by the law." One difficulty in coming up with hard numbers is that the sites in question are largely pay-per-view, a reality that makes it hard -- and expensive -- for authors to police the Net looking for purloined porn. "Mr. Slot," an Australian erotica writer who goes the extra step of making stories like "Librarian I" and "Truth or Dare III" available for the Palm Pilot, says: "We can't buy membership to every site just to make sure they don't misuse our stories, and although people have hacked into the sites in question to check, there's just too many of them." He points out that not only is the writer being ripped off, the reader is as well -- in being charged for something that has been given away by the author.

Writers' views of what rights can be practically enforced on the Net vary wildly. In the newsgroup alt.sex.stories.d, a community of erotic writers meets to talk shop, but discussions about copyright infringement frequently erupt into flame wars.

A vocal minority takes the position that anything posted on Usenet is a gift that essentially exists in the public domain. And when caught red-handed, the offending story pilferers often cite such Net rhetoric as their dubious defense. Other authors, including Delta, claim the full rights of any writer, yet have a tough time enforcing this dominion over their words. Others fall somewhere in the middle, authorizing any noncommercial reproduction of their work -- like a fan posting an erotic story to her own home page -- but drawing the line against commercial sites eager to profit off their work. Although they attach notices to this effect at the beginning of every story, these statements about permissions are just erased by the first reposter, making the story ripe for further lifting.

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